(c) Annie Leibovitz
I love Tennessee Williams. He exposes denial and deceit where he finds it, sometimes to no avail. All of the characters in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof lie, and know that they are being lied to. They wink, they nod and they think that they are so smart and that no one else knows what is going on. Such mendacity.
Scarlett Johansson's Maggie is a white trash debutante. She drops all pretense of the southern belle and announces to anyone that will listen that "You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it," in her husky southern drawl. She sounds like she smokes two packs of Camels a day. There is no sing song southern lilt to her voice. Maggie is calling people on their shit and there is going to be hell to pay if they don't straighten up and fly right. She's pissed off, and can you blame her? Her husband is a closet case alcoholic. Her father-in-law is a pervy, dying horny toad, and she's surrounded by no neck little monsters. Johansson carries the first act, and is the strong rope that connects the second and third acts.
Benjamin Walker's Brick is a wet mess. He's a whiny jock on a bourbon bender. He limps around in nothing but a towel during the first act. At one point he drops the towel, and bares his butt like he's in a locker room full of men, instead of in the bedroom with his wife, which only fuels the melodrama. Brick's anger flares at the mention of the name Skipper, while his wife and even his father try to be supportive of his relationship with his former team mate. His family pretends not to judge him as they tip toe around the pink elephant in the bedroom. If only Brick could have admitted that he loved Skipper, everyone would be able to move on. Today, we would call this a Bro-mance, back then it was named dirty.
Perhaps the most disturbing character in this mid century melodrama is Debra Monk's Big Momma. She is the brunt of everyone's joke. Including her own husband, Big Daddy. She is shrill and deliberate in her denial of the truth. It was a brave portrayal of a desperate, clingy idiot.
Big Daddy on the other hand had a few layers. Big Daddy is where the tire hits the bone, to mix a metaphor. The only problem that I had with Cirian Hinds' Big Daddy is that he sometimes dropped his southern accent for a mid-western brogue. C'mon, it's not that difficult. Pick a dialect and stick to it.
If there is one weakness, I blame it on the director for leaving the actors to their own devices to figure the whole thing out. It seems his main contribution was Skipper's ghost which was ultimately cut. Go figure. The sound effects were way too loud and the set was a disorienting series of french doors.
It is easy to make comparisons to the classic 1958 film with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. Taylor's Maggie the cat was soft and purring and beautiful, but she had claws. One believes that she was at one time a stunning debutante who could have had any young beau she wanted. Now she's stuck in a passionless, loveless marriage. Paul Newman' Brick smoulders with regret and loneliness. He also had the right haircut. Benjamin Walker's hair was too long and glam for sports announcer of the fifties. It seems like a small thing, and it hits you after you leave the theater, however it leaves one with the impression that Walker didn't deem the role important enough to get a haircut.
Tennessee Williams wrote a short essay called Person-To-Person which appears as a prologue in the book Cat On a Hot Tin Roof published by Signet (1958). In it he says, "Meanwhile!-I want to go on talking to you as freely and intimately about what we live and die for as if I knew you better than anyone else whom you know."
Keep talking Tennessee, keep talking.
Preston Sinclair
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof : Official Broadway site
